Given the criticism of Oblivion's super limited Voice Acting cast, I'm sure that Bethesda is going to try to go the extra mile this time on their voice acting... Only problem being, with the large number of variables given with the new Radiant Story feature (allowing quests to be custom tailored to your character) that will surely require a lot more dialogue to be recorded and stored for all of the variables even if Skyrim has the same number of quests as Oblivion. If you don't know what I mean, just take the simple problem of changing the location of something in a quest.

eg. "Help me, my daughter is being held in Sidewinder cave by bandits!"
"Help me, my daughter is being held in Dripwater Grotto by bandits!"
"Help me, my daughter is being held in etc. etc. by necromancers..." you get the picture.
This used to be just one line of dialogue, read by one of 5 voice actors. Now, you can change the location, the enemies involved, and even the quest giver... this is an exponentially higher number of unique recordings!

Do they have some clever way of compressing a billion lines of dialogue so they can fit on a single multilayer DVD alongside all the other goodies? Do they simply leave the details of the quest, or at least the variables, out of the voice acting and just hand you a note with the details written out? Do they have a good computer algorithm that can just splice in the words that need changing without sounding unnatural? Hmmm...
And we're starving for some information here, so maybe a dev can answer this little question just to keep the mobs fed.

If you recall, at the end of the tutorial level in Oblivion the last living guard guessed at your class based on fighting style. The technology exists, have no fear.

They could go for a rather svcky approach and make it like "Please help me! My son's been kidnapped! It's all written down on this note for you to read..." but somewhat knowing Bethesda, I sure dont think they'll try to pull that crap with us.

It'll probably be something like "Oh, bandits took my daughter to a cave, let me mark it on your map."

Yes, and while that might scale for a few dozen options, it does not scale to 5 dozen quests, each with 5 dozen locations and a dozen aims, featuring several hundred people. And anybody could say those, not one voice actor.

No, doing it like that is too space hungry. They'll likely be messages that leave out the changing details, but as the quests themselves aren't random, just the specifics, the wording will fit quite snugly.

I think we've a long way to go yet before any developer feels comfortable enough substituting traditional voice acting with psuedo-voice synthesis like the type you mentioned.

It's an interesting and ironic point we've hit in the industry when you can't really make games of the same scope as the older ones simply due to the sheer amount of work needed. VA is one of the most obvious examples on this.

Dude, that's just one line of dialogue for each of 21 classes. Hardly the same as the couple thousand of combinations involved in having dialogue for all the quests that the game will generate.

There are write arounds though, such as there being only one voice actor who gives the "save my daughter" quest.

"psuedo-voice synthesis"??? I just meant that they could just record the line like this "Hi my name is _______"
and then record seperately, "Dan, Mike, Steve, etc."
the computer just plugs in the appropriate word.

the trick is making it flow.

that said, you are right about that being the most ironic thing about this. There are some pretty cool conversational AI simulations out there, but to put them in a game today would be horrible because the voices wouldn't work.

my point exactly, this is an exponential problem. The more variables that they introduce, the more outcomes there are potentially needing recordings.

To those thinking I'm saying it won't work, I'm NOT. I just am curious HOW they are handling it, the Dev's obviously have a plan, and I just want to know what it is.

"Help me, my daughter has been taken by bandits. They have been known to use the caves in this area"

You're probably right, but that would be kind of strange. She's in one of these caves, but I can just mark it on your map though since I know which one it is... I just didn't want to say it...

This gets further complicated by the increased number of voice actors. Then there's the smack talking your enemies do and you got 100 or so companions that can tag along. I think it's safe to say that no matter what method they choose to go with there's going to be a lot more recorded dialog than in Oblivion. They've already stated that the game is shipping on a single DVD, atleast the 360 version is. I think this is dipping into something significant that Beth hasn't revealed yet.

I think you are right, voice acting is either going to be really lame or they have something revolutionary on this front to reveal later. Audio files take up a ton of space, and so they either have a really genius compressor or they have some other trick up their sleeve. Keep in mind, they are fitting a much higher fidelity world on the same size disk as Oblivion...

"She's in a cave around here"

After all, how come peasants know the name of ever stinking cave in the province?

"Help me, my daughter has been taken by bandits. They have been known to use a cave in this area. Let me show you the way."

They did mention NPCs guiding the way to certain locations, didn't they?

One line for the problem "my daughter has been kidnapped". One line for the cause "those damn goblins, why don't they die all!". One line for the location "You must go to the broken rib cave, it's a very dangerous place, take care". Problem solved. Here with 160 places to go, 100 mission types and 200 enemy type, 460 lines would be enough. Make it 4600 for 10 different voices and presto. Surely mission and enemy type amount will be lower, but the fact is that this way you are adding not multiplying. I have think this in few seconds, Bethesda devs have had various years. Obviously they had don this or something better. Don't worry.

I'm glad you have think this in a few seconds, but I think there are alot more dialogue options than you realize.

Maybe, and this would suppose more lines, but what I am saying is that they can record the text by phrases, reducing the amount of dialog to a tolerable number.

Yeah, you are right that the dialog being in phrases will reduce the number, but ONLY if they are sharing the voice actors again over a large number of people... That was one of the main criticisms previously, so I would think they will be doing away with that formula.
If the voice actors are one to one or at least one to 10 instead of one to 60 like in Oblivion, the number of phrases per actor will still be ridiculously high to hit all the possibilities.

Isn't radiant story affecting what quests throw at you based on past experiences, strenghts, weaknesses and location? where exactly has it been said that quests will be announced dynamically by random NPC's? which isnt what Radiant story does.

Well, 10000 phrases per person, didn't seem a great ammount for people working 8 hours a day during various years.

It's fairly easy I'd say, just make the dialogue vague and generic. They do it now for the most part. They added in the quest markers in Oblivion to cater to this. You don't have the for example quest directions like you see in Morrowind. Voice actor space is the biggest limiting factor in RPG's now it seems.

I wouldn't be that surprised if Bethesda included a cutting edge speech synthesiser package in the game, with a tweaked vocabulary/sentence set to smooth out the intonation and add inflection. The latest business versions of this sort of software are right at the cusp of passing for human and are actually small in terms of memory - minuscule in fact when compared with thousands of lines of pre-recorded voice acting.

Even if it doesn't appear in Skyrim, the next TES game will almost certainly include it. When each 'voice' only takes up a handful of Mb and can be further adjusted via variables to give a different tone, speed and so on, you can literally have a cast of hundreds for a handful of memory. Plus you can pump an near infinite set of procedurally created sentences through it.

Of course they'll still use big-name (or should that be big-voice) actors to create the pre-generated main quest speeches, but even if its not in Skyrim the future for radiant story will ultimately be speech synthesis.

Edit: Actually come to think about it, you could get away with some slightly weird (not quite perfect) intonation by explaining it as racial accents, or difficulties in pronouncing a 'foreign' language by non-nords.

errr... wow, do you have a link to a demonstration of this? If that exists that would be the best thing ever... but... really? It exists??